PIMS in the new millennium: How PIMS might be different tomorrow

From one perspective, the objective of this chapter is to develop a researcher's “wish list” for an idealized dataset to address questions in marketing strategy and elsewhere. From another viewpoint, the topics in this chapter indicate how our field has shifted since the early seventies. In the process of studying “the profit impact of marketing strategy” we have learned that “profit” is not so easily defined and that “strategy” is a somewhat ambiguous term. While the subject of this chapter is mainly what a revised and revived PIMS project might look like, we should note that PIMS Europe is alive and well. (See Box 11.1 for a brief update of the current PIMS management philosophy.) While PIMS Europe is also open to proposals from academics and others for joint research projects, the organization is clearly more consulting-oriented than either the original PIMS project or what we have in (wishful) mind. Our final chapter is organized as follows. With the assumption that form and substance will follow function, we begin with a discussion of how the marketing mix has changed. Section 11.1 discusses changes in marketing programs, dimensions of marketing strategy, and the possibilities for defining marketing costs that would be encompassed by a present-day PIMS project. Collectively, these changes have substantially redefined the strategic marketing mix for many companies. Section 11.2 discusses new performance measures that may redefine or augment traditional measures of ROI and ROS, which occupied center stage for the original PIMS project.